Monday, December 8, 2014

Desolate Shrine are a band from Finland that has been featured before in this zine and plays a blackened form of occult death/doom metal and this is a review of their album "The Heart Of The Netherworld" which will be released in 2015 by Dark Descent Records.

A very dark, atmospheric and ritualistic sounding intro starts off the album and after a minute the music goes into more of a dark death metal direction and when the music speeds up you can hear some blast beats and black metal elements being added onto the recording and a good portion of the tracks are very long and epic in length.

Black metal screams and death metal growls can be heard throughout the recording and the band also brings in a good mixture of slow, mid paced and fast parts along with some dark sounding melodies and as the album progresses clean playing can be heard in certain sections of the recording and they also bring in more of a dark atmosphere to the bands musical sound when they are utilized.

On some of the songs the band adds in a very ritualistic atmosphere into their dark style of death metal and you can also hear a great amount of doom metal elements in the slower sections of the tracks and on one of the later songs keyboards are added into the music and the album starts bringing in more black metal influences onto the last couple of tracks.

Desolate Shrine creates another dark and ritualistic sounding blackened death metal album with this recording and they expand on the sound that was heard on their previous releases while also taking their music into the darker direction, the production sounds very professional while the lyrics cover misanthropy, nihilism, satanism and occultism themes.

In my opinion this is another great sounding recording from Desolate Shrine and if you are a fan of this band, you should enjoy this album. RECOMMENDED TRACKS INCLUDE "Black Fires Of God" "We Dawn Anew" and "Heart of the Netherworld". 8 out of 10.